The whole history of human existence is intertwined with the existence of communities. We all belong to different communities, even if we do not realize it. People have been gathering in groups for a long time, discussing news, sharing their knowledge, and solving problems together.

And the fact that people in a group can collaborate to solve their problems is the main reason why they join communities.

My name is Artur, and at SoftServe, I am actively working to build communities for developers. Such a community is an association of people within a company where we can grow, help others grow, and solve problems. My goal is to create an environment where people with common interests can share their knowledge and experience, grow professionally, and find new friends. One of the tools to achieve it is online events. In 2021, I organized 133 events attended by more than 7,500 people.

I want to emphasize that SoftServe is actively working on developing communities; here, they are engaged and coordinated by people like me. We have communities for programmers, project managers, testers, technical communicators, and even people who work with communities. The war has temporarily suspended our activities, but now, we resume our work and have already held several events in May.

In this article, I want to share my observations on why every developer needs to be a part of different technical communities. Here are five main reasons why developers can benefit from communities.

1. Improve yourself and keep evolving

The IT world constantly changes and evolves: new technologies, tools, and methodologies emerge. That is why to be a great developer, you need to learn regularly and improve your skills. And it is in the communities you can learn something new, communicate with like-minded people, and get valuable advice. At SoftServe, we regularly hold bi-weekly online knowledge-sharing and experience-sharing events for each community with one or more speakers. Notably, the events often consist of a review part and live coding, where the speaker demonstrates how to use what they are talking about in practice.

For example, one of our last events in the Web UI Community was called “Microfrontends. Deep dive”. The speaker was a lead developer from Gliwice, Poland, with more than 20 years of experience in programming. Here is one of the reviews:

Invite such wonderful speakers more often! He was the nicest and the most interesting person I have ever met at such events. It is clear that he is a high-level specialist. Plus, Maciej is an extremely delightful and charming personality.

Feedback from event

We hold many such events and regularly invite Tech Lead / Senior level speakers from countries where SoftServe operates. Thanks to these events participants of our communities get a great wealth of new knowledge and learn from the experience of others.

2. Be an opinion leader and share your knowledge and experience

In addition to training, you can try yourself as a speaker in communities and improve your public speaking skills. You can also improve your personal brand through this role. If you want to become a speaker, we, for our part, will do everything possible to organize the event at a high level. We also help you choose a topic, give structured presentation templates, review the finished presentation, and provide tips on how to improve your performance. We help and support our speakers at every stage of preparation.

If you’re worried because you’ve never presented before, that is not a problem!

Everyone gets nervous at first, but they gain valuable experience and become more confident. I remember one developer admitting before the presentation that she was very nervous. But I knew that everything would work out because we had helped her with the presentation the day before and then checked the material with the community leader. As a result, she successfully spoke to an audience of over 100 people, received constructive feedback, and now feels much more confident with speaking.

3. Dive into a vast knowledge base

Every community is a source of helpful information. There are people who know how to do what others need help with. There are events that help solve the problems most developers face.

Currently, we have a whole library of event recordings and speaker presentations on various topics that might be interesting or useful for engineers. For example, here are the topics of several recent events: how to do code reviews, refactoring, Skala 3, Spring Boot, Kotlin, and many others. Now, our library stores more than 140 videos with valuable and relevant educational materials, and this collection is constantly updated with new records.

Each community member can enter a keyword or a topic of interest, get several results, look through these materials and learn something new or improve their skills. And if you want, you can contact the speaker who covered a specific topic to clarify the details or ask for advice. And if there are no materials on a particular topic, there are two options: contact me, and I will try to find a speaker and organize an event on that topic or add it to the list of current speech topics that every community has.

4. Get to know each other, make friends, and expand your network

One of the advantages of communities is meeting people who have similar interests and goals and, most importantly, have experience dealing with issues you encounter in your professional development.

Networking allows you to adopt the experience and knowledge of hundreds of other engineering teams in the company, discuss the best ways to solve a particular professional problem, share success stories and victories, and much more.

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Big Data community offline event in Lviv

For effective networking, we regularly organize events in the format of community meetups and gatherings. These meetings allow engineers to build a network of contacts and friends. And I would like to add that we are constantly trying to improve networking between developers to create a thoughtful environment that helps developers interact with each other.

5. Be involved in something bigger

Being a part of a community allows you to participate in the development of your project and have influence at the company level. You can take the initiative and organize various hackathons and technical challenges, mentor others, and participate in various additional activities. I often involve active community members in other services I work with within our company. For example, I may ask a person to become a mentor for another developer and help them with the promotion or conduct an interview for a project that does not have an assigned expert.

In addition, when you are a member of a community, you start to notice that your problems are not unique and that someone has experienced them. You can always talk to other developers who can help you with advice or just listen. This gives you a sense of belonging not just to a single project but to the entire company. You will know that you have a circle of like-minded people.

As a community member, you become a part of other projects and teams and feel involved in essential processes. You begin to think on a larger scale and new perspectives and horizons for development open for you. Work becomes more than just a job: it becomes a hobby you can share with like-minded people.

Join communities, be active, speak up, give others advice, and feel free to ask questions. Communities are made by those who are part of them. And I hope you join us soon!

See you around!